“It’s the inflow crack,” he said.
That’s when her inventory analyst, Leo, walked in. He held a printout of their , but he’d drawn a jagged line across it with a red marker. inflow inventory crack
Marta grabbed a radio. “All supervisors, huddle at Bay 12. We’re declaring an inflow crack. Stop all non-critical inbound appointments for 48 hours. Shift 20 pickers to put-away. And Leo—calculate our absorption rate per hour. I want to know exactly how wide this crack is.” “It’s the inflow crack,” he said
He pointed to the report. “Here’s our crack: last Tuesday, we received a double shipment of gaming consoles. Our put-away crew could only handle 40% of it. The rest sat on the dock for 36 hours. In those 36 hours, new trucks arrived. Now we have consoles blocking the aisle for phone cases. The phone cases can’t get to their slots. So orders for phone cases are late. And because the consoles sat so long, we missed the return window for a damaged batch. We just took a $90,000 loss.” Marta grabbed a radio
The next month, when a junior buyer asked her, “What’s the biggest risk to our supply chain?” she didn’t say fires or port strikes or demand spikes .